Iron Giant opens with the recently achieved launch of Sputnik and explicitly deals with anxiety about annihilation, which was not yet so fully developed when The Day The Earth Stood Still was made, and as Iron Giant is a product of the 90′s, it is clearly a retroactive commentary on Cold War anxiety, and not a representative product of it. The central problematic figures of both, however, are quite analogous: seemingly all-powerful robotic beings from outside the Earth who use violence to counter violence. In Day, the purpose of the robot Gort is laid out very plainly by the alien emissary Klaatu, but in Iron Giant  the titular robot arrives on Earth with no explanatory companion, and a case of amnesia which leaves his true purpose unclear even to himself. This makes the Iron Giant a more complicated figure, more in line with actors in the real world that attempt to use violence to quell violence.

So: Sputnik is launched and not too long afterwards, a skyscraper-sized metal creature plummets into the sea off the coast of Maine, a young boy finds it, discovers it has a (metaphorical) heart of gold, finds a beatnik artist-run scrapyard with metal for it to eat, and hides it from the federal agent who is sure that it’s a dangerous Soviet weapon. Along the way, boy and ‘bot come across a deer felled by hunters, ‘bot learns that guns kill, and, when boy then plays with a toy ray gun, the sight of the fake gun activates some as-yet latent weapon that shoots from his eyes.

They killed Bambi...again.

This leads to a series of events in which the US Army attacks the metal creature, who, when it thinks the boy has been killed, transforms from cute tin man to frightening killing machine, straight from War of Worlds. Those being attacked by the robot don’t know that it has, so far, been a friendly companion to a young boy, learning about the world in a childlike manner, and is now reacting to violence done against himself and his human friend. They do not associate their actions with his, and have no particular reason to think that the robot was not in fact sent as an instrument of destruction. In fact, as viewers even we cannot be sure of this: the Iron Giant’s transformation into a weapons platform is accompanied by the fixing of a dent in his head that is suggested to be the cause of his amnesia. He may, in fact, be reverting to his original programming to destroy Earth’s inhabitants, and when he sacrifices himself to save the townspeople from the nuclear missiles that were foolishly launched at him, we cannot be sure if this defensive, sacrificial act is in his original nature, or if it derived from traits learned during his time with the boy.

Whether the original intent behind sending the giant to Earth was a friendly or aggressive one, whether it is armed for war or armed to function as a Gort-like anti-violence police, there is very little way for the inhabitants of Earth to ascertain the truth, they can only directly react to what they see: a super-weapon spreading devastation. As viewers of the film, we have an emotional connection to the robot and believe that if the Army had not attacked him, he would not be attacking them.

As informed Westerners, we may think that the United States and the rest of the International Security Assistance Force had good reason to invade Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda training camps and deny them a safe haven, and we may think that remaining there can be justified as necessary to prevent the takeover of that country by violent extremists and to improve the “quality of life” of those living there. (Leaving aside for the moment how flawed this thinking may be.) However, when surveys show 92% of Southern Afghans never having heard of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, it’s hard to see how this narrative can be communicated or accepted by Afghans themselves: they are much more likely to see Western military forces as a metallic, mechanized giant on a rampage. Even as informed observers, can we really be sure that the actions taken by this mechanized system are purely defensive in nature, and not an emotional outlashing or the expression of some fundamental programming?

By making drawing out the complications that arise from the sort of armed enforcement of order present in the Day The Earth Stood Still, The Iron Giant comes closer to portraying how such an approach often plays out in the real world, and suggests that the nature of armed intervention is largely determined by how it seen: it is only a paranoid, militarized mindset that turns the giant into a problem to be tackled by the military, and an outlook with such a limited toolset will tend to create more and more problems that appear to be thusly fixable.

It’s a well-established cliché that telecommunications technology and high-speed transportation methods make the world a smaller place – that they modify (shrink) space, or the experience of space.

It might be more useful to say that communications technology contracts time, and that with the creation of the Internet, time has shrunk to nearly a singularity in much of the world, communication becoming sufficiently dense to create an moment of simultaneous awareness. However, this in turns problematizes the distances of space in new ways.

There are plenty of empirical phenomena that can be used to gauge series of events, and to thereby say that certain events happened at the same time, others before or after, but in terms of subjective human experience, time has traditionally passed not simultaneously, but in parallel. We can say that a certain event in human history occurred somewhere in Mesoamerica in what we now call 1000 CE and that another event happened in the same year in a region of the Ural mountains, and this will be empirically true so far as it can be measured against another event which happened simultaneously to both (a certain volcanic eruption, say or the passing of a comet) yet in terms of human experience, time was passing in Mesoamerica and the Urals in parallel: while they were both happening at the same time, the lack of interknowledge between the two experiential time streams separates them. This is true of smaller distances: Early Medieval Spain and Early Medieval France may have been closer to having simultaneous streams of time, but events (or information about the events, or meaningful effects stemming from that event  that happened in a Spanish village would still take time to reach a French village, and this is part of what imbued time and space with meaning: space was what it took time to travel through. Space separated times and time separated spaces, they were measurements of each other.

With contemporary telecommunications and data storage, there comes a deep spatio-temporal disorientation. If I can follow events in, for example, Cairo’s Tahrir Square in real-time day after day via Twitter and al-Jazeera, it becomes increasingly uncanny that my quotidian experience, as dictated by interaction with my direct physical environment, stays the same, that I do not find myself swept up in a factory strike or swept away by military police. As time shrinks we are confronted by the fact that space has not shrunk commensurately, and the increasing disconnect makes space considerably weird.

There is a simultaneous effect working on the past as more and more cultural material and information is stored and made increasingly available: the singular moment fostered by communications technology reaches further and more widely into the past. If, for example, the most-recently released English fusion of dubstep and Chicago footwork and the most recent “Cold Wave” compilation of Belgian synth-pop come to me simultaneously, in the same formats and through the same channels, both seem equally contemporary and of the present moment. This phenomenon then goes on to influence the creation of new cultural materials, and one hears more and more artists influenced equally by bands of young white middle class Americans from four years in the past and compilations of West African guitar pop recorded in the early 1970′s that were re-issued four years in the past, and in a few more years I would be completely unsurprised to hear newly created works that split the difference between Cold Wave and second-decade dubstep. Materials spiral steadily toward the center of the temporal singularity, and in being transmitted through a global communications network, works that were once tied to a place more and more lose spacial specificity due to temporal simultaneity.

It becomes easier and easier to absorb without a second thought these combinations of what were previously spatio-temporally disparate influences. 70′s afro-pop and mid-aughts indie rock combine to the extent that a fusion of the two (controversially at first) eventually it becomes its own strain of pop music. We listen to post-dubstep R&B and begin to forget that we didn’t listen to R&B in the first place. Eventually, people who only listened to post-dubstep R&B will make their own R&B, and it will eventually seem to fit perfectly next to R&B made two to three decades previous.

However, there are artists that can still create their own powerful disorienting effect, and again this disorientation is spatial.

All of which is to say that today, May 10th, is the release date of Gang Gang Dance’s Eye Contact, and the foremost question in my mind when I listen to that album is: where and when will people listen to music like this? It is full of songs that, if I try fumbling towards a description, I would have to call New Age Stoner Jam Old-Skool Rave Revival Chinese-Pop from the 2030′s. Where would such a music be made? In what contexts would people listen to it, what will the physical environment in which that they negotiate their quotidian lives be like? To respectfully disagree with Mark Abraham in Cokemachineglow, I believe he sells the album short when he says that “the band is demanding we hold their gaze while they school us on the finer points of the popular music of the last 30 years,” thereby making it less exciting than the more ahead-of-the-game Saint Dymphna (2008). I wouldn’t say that Gang Gang Dance is deliberately and self-consciously mining the past, they are merely operating in a space in which the past (and future) have collapsed; Mark Abraham seems slightly annoyed that the album opens with the quote “I can hear everything–it’s everything time,” but he may be reading it incorrectly. The phrase doesnt’ mean that it is “time for everything” – that is, time for Gang Gang Dance to combine everything they can muster over the course of the album following that introductory quote, but that the album takes place in “everything time,” the temporal singularity in which past, present and future are folded together. (On a sidenote, It’s also more likely — certainly more appropriate — that the increasing-infinity interludes refers less to “the ten-year-old’s game of ‘infinity x 3′ trumping lesser infinities” and more to the Georg Cantor’s concept of the transfinite.)

Eye Contact is the exemplar of a field of work being released this year that could be called “Futuristic Non-Anglo-American Pop Made By Anglo-Americans,” along with Rainbow Arabia’s Boys and Diamonds and, to some extent, Battles’ Gloss Drop (they decided to borrow a Chilean on Köln’s Kompakt label and a Japanese mad visionary to speak for them) and Ponytail’s Do Whatever You Want All The Time.

Like Boys and Diamonds, Eye Contact suggests a kind of conjectural or imaginary world music. On that album, Rainbow Arabia summons the strand of Swedish pop that combines 80′s synth memories with chintzily borrowed africanisms, and stretches it into an invented future, perhaps one in which Chinese artists begin to borrow cultural elements from the countries (many African) which the PRC has, in the past half-decade, begun to send investment dollars and Chinese workers to, forming a new syncretic music based on new conceptions of periphery and core. Of course, it’s unlikely that such music will ever come to pass in such a context: even if the 2030′s do see a wave of Chineseafrosynthpop, it will probably sound unlike either of these albums. However, when technology continues to compress time into a singular moment, why wait to create a music until it’s chronologically or geographically appropriate? The deep spatio-temporal disorientation brought about electronic telecommunications creates a confusion in both listener and artist: how can Gang Gang Dance not feel that they are perfectly capable of using the elements of the past to create the future music of other peoples, and how can I, as a listener, wary as I try to be of “appropriation” and allow Euro-American subjectivities to speak for the “other,” not somehow believe that this band, and those like them, are able to do just that?

Eye Contact ends with a robot voice whispering “live forever,” and this is the ultimate effect of the squashing of time, perhaps one part of why so many tech-optimistic futurists insist on predicting some sort of  human immortality by the end of the century: if one is constantly in an eternal moment, how can one ever expect to die? That voice commanding us to “live forever” may as well be the voice of the Internet itself.

Oh, and if you were wondering: it’s a very enjoyable listen, too, synthy, percussive, complex and messily beautiful music that sounds like what the future used to sound like, what the future sounds like now, and quite possibly what the future will sound like in the future. I’m not sure if, come December, I will consider Eye Contact to be the “best” album of the year, or the one I enjoyed the most, but I have no doubt that it will win the Zeitgeist Award for 2011.

Strange vibrations.

t.

He identifies Mills argument for freedom of speech thusly:

Premise 1:  Many of our past opinions, which we had held with great conviction, have turned out to be false.  

Premise 2:  So, some of our current opinions that we hold with great conviction may also turn out to be false. 

From these premises, he drew a conclusion about tolerance and free speech,

Conclusion:  Therefore, let us tolerate dissenting opinions just in case our current opinions are wrong and these dissenting opinions are right.

Bilgrami’s begins to attack this reasoning:

To begin with, even at a cursory glance, you will notice that the judgement in the first premise is made from the point of view of one’s current opinions and convictions.  It is from our present point of view, from what we currently take to be true, that we are able to say that our past opinions are false.  But the judgement in the second premise is telling us that our current point of view may contain false views and therefore to be unsure and diffident about them.  Now, if we are unsure about our current beliefs, and our judgement in the first premise is made on the basis of our current beliefs, then to that extent we must be unsure of our first and basic premise.  Any conclusion based on it therefore is bound to be, to that extent, itself shaky and uncertain.

This idea, that the fallibility of past opinions cannot be known because “some past opinions have turned out to be false” is, itself, a held opinion, and can therefore be false, does not, for me, hold water, because “some past opinions have turned out to be false” and “some of current opinions may also turn out to be false” are both neccessarily true because the only alternative possibility is for there to be a point in time at which all current opinions are true. This would seem to me to be an obvious impossibility: knowledge must be limited and therefore imperfectable: to store all information about the universe, it would be neccessary to use an amount of matter equal to all the matter of the universe, and if one were to somehow store information about the universe outside the universe, that would demand a recognition that there is even more outside the universe which we cannot have perfect knowledge of. These theoretical extremes have very little to do with the sorts of opinions that both Mill and Bilgrami are talking about, but they do function to show that Premise 1 and 2 are neccessarily true. They can be supported against Bilgrami’s objections by the addition of the premise:

Premise 0: At no point will all currently held opinions be all perfectly true.

Bilgrami prefers Mill’s other arguments for freedom of speech, for example that it breeds creativity, diversity and moral courage, and while I may agree that these are more noble and attractive, I see no reason to throw out the “meta-inductive” reasoning presented above. To me, the oddest part of Bilgrami’s complaint is this:

But, now, if that is so, there is something internally peculiar about an argument that appeals to the value of truth and the goal of pursuing the truth, as it does, while also implying, as the second premise does, that we can never know that we have achieved the truth.  How can we claim to have a goal that we can never know we have achieved, when we have achieved it?  What sort of goal is that?  It is not perhaps as peculiar as having a goal that we know that we can never achieve.  That is outright incoherent.  You cannot coherently strive to achieve what you know to be impossible.  But to allow that we can achieve a goal and yet insist that we can never know we have achieved it when we have, though not perhaps outright incoherent, is a very peculiar understanding of what goals are. 

Truth-seeking is not a “goal” in the sense he wants to insist upon, it functions more as an orientation or an attitude. He is essentially calling the scientific method incoherent: this central axis of modern truth-seeking is not at all about finding things that are true and knowing with certainty that they are true, it is an attempt to compile an increasing number of correlations between theory and observed reality while striving to falsify previously held opinions and theories, thereby aligning it quite closely with Mill’s meta-inductive argument. Falsification is possible while absolute verification never is; without the assumption that some past and current opinions must be false, there is little reason to continue the pursuit of truth.

Bilgrami asks

If the goal of inquiry into the truth that all academic institutions embrace is really to pursue in this way something that we never can be sure we have achieved, then we must be assuming that what we do, in pursuing it, is a bit like sending a message in a bottle out to sea.  We never know what comes of it, we never know that it has arrived.  What sort of epistemological project is that?

and I would suggest that it is the only sort of epistimelogical project possible, thank you very much.

Bilgrami then states that this Millian meta-inductive argument, which he finds so much fault in, is directly tied to the form of “balance” in academic life which is used not to inspire the full consideration of all available evidence but to require that two sides of a disagreement be presented, which often amounts to a bullying tactic for the side with little or no evidence at all to be included in a discussion. While I agree that this conception of balance is unacceptable, I don’t see that Bilgrami even bothers to explain how Mill’s reasoning leads directly to.

After he leaves Mill be, Bilgrami’s piece becomes much more illuminating, as he moves to discuss his idea that the most subtle, and therefore in some ways the most injurious form of academic unfreedom is the exclusion of alternative frameworks of investigating, thinking and knowing, which also excludes the evidence and arguments that might arise from that framework, which are never taken into consideration, but also never consciously excluded because they are never even brought into the awareness of the guardians of academic orthodoxy. It’s worth reading, and he ends by making a point I myself tend to emphasize: that academics (and people in general) have more of a moral responsibility to criticize those systems of which they themselves form a part, or to which they are more directly connected.

It is said that whenever Sakharov criticized the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissidents in the fifties, he was chastised by his government for showing an imbalance and not speaking out against the treatment of blacks in the American South.  That is precisely the kind of imbalance that courageous academics are going to be accused of by the enemies of academic freedom in this country, and I hope that all of us will have the courage to continue being imbalanced in just this way.

[Echo regularly criticizes the PRT's treatment of dissidents.]

While many of the plot points have since become the stuff of sci-fi cliche, it still has considerable charms – the central acting duo is superb, with a nuance performance from Patricia Neal’s and Michael Rennie’s bemused but earnest professorly Klaatu seemingly planting the seeds for both Spock and David Bowie. Compared to any movie made for mass consumption today, it gets straight to the point, the premise being well established within the first three minutes, mercifully sparing the audience from the boilerplate character introduction that has become de rigueur. The dramatic event that serves as the film’s namesake is also refreshingly low-key: most of the Earth’s electric devices stop working for 30 minutes, something that no-one would bat an eye at in a more contemporary sci-fi film.

Of course, The Day The Earth Stood Still isn’t really a science fiction thriller, it’s a classic Cold War “why can’t we all get along” nuclear-anxiety lecture piece. However, the mechanism through which this lesson is imparted by Klaatu (the assembled species of the other planets apparently speak Esperanto) works to remind us of the common ideological roots of neo-conservatism and liberal interventionism, and how the Beltway view of the world has developed over the last 50 years.

Klaatu comes to visit “in peace and with goodwill,” but the message he  delivers at the end of the film contains an odd sort of peace. He states that the peoples of other planets now live without violence between them, but if the aggression and war that humans currently practice on Earth is brought out beyond its atmosphere, they will have no choice but to destroy the entire species, perhaps the whole planet, although what exactly all other species of flora and fauna have to do with it is never made clear.

This kind of peace – be nice or be destroyed – seems to have become the guiding principle of a military superpower which for the last few decades has been utterly incompetent in attempts to negotiate the prevention or termination of violent conflict elsewhere in the world, but has, with some regularity, been willing to summon the Iron Smiley Face of armed intervention, from the troubled actions in the Balkans and Libya to the clearly deranged neo-imperalist invasion of Iraq. (While there were enough commercial and geostrategic interests in the later case for the idea of “intervention” to be bypassed entirely, enough of the people who planned and supported the invasion believed it for it to be relevant.)

What’s more interesting is the method by which the other planets came to live in peace in the first place – they built robots that would destroy them if they acted aggressively against each other. So, while The Day The Earth Stood Still might seem to be a cry against the madness of a nuclear-armed world, the answer presented in the plot is actually just another form of mutually assurred destruction. A galaxy of Gort-enforced order reminds one of America’s position in today’s world a technical sense, as we, too, are now instructing machines to enforce a moral order, as with the increasingly visible unmanned aerial vehicles that run illegal CIA assissination campaigns over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen,  and now appearing over Libya (or, leaving the UAV’s aside, as with a military whose freedom of action is based entirely on technological superiority).

Klaatu’s solution to violence shares with the dominant Western order a basic inability to craft solutions with tools besides those which created the problem under consideration. This conceptual trap leads to the tremendous waste of using foreign occupation to try to fix Afghani problems that have in large part been caused by decades of foreign occupation, the waste of spending over $500,000 per missle to destroy miltiary vehicles on Libyan highways that the major Western powers were only all too eager to sell to Qadaffi mere years ago.

50 years, ago, the well meaning American idea of  peace was a world of robots poised to violently punish the violent, and it’s only too easy to see how that contradiction has remained and festered in the national imagination since.

This leads me to an additional thought extending of the previous post’s discussion of the cyborg ethics of eating. Might animal behavior such as this suggest that human judgements on the morality of food consumption in nature are actually not so much inappropriate insertions of moral concepts into a moral vacuum as they are an imposition of human ethics on living beings which possess their own ethical systems? Would attempts to modify existing ecological systems in order to make them more ethical in our eyes then not be a form of inter-species cultural imperialism?